David Copperfield: extract 1 – commentary
This extract from chapter 4 of David Copperfield, Charles Dickens’ eighth novel published
between 1849 and 1950, narrates a scene from David’s childhood. David, the orphaned
narrator, lives with his mother Clara and their devoted servant Peggotty. When David is
about eight years old, his mother marries a Mr Murdstone. This scene takes place shortly
after their marriage and relates the settling of Jane, Mr Murdstone’s sister, with the young
married couple. Jane immediately takes control of the house, which happens to belong to
Clara. Clara weakly attempts to resist but yields to the Murdstones. The narrator seizes this
opportunity to define the characters’ personalities and to expose the Murdstones’
manipulative strategy.
I will first discuss Jane’s hypocrisy. I will then examine Edward’s “firmness”.
As soon as Miss Murdstone enters Edward and Clara’s house, she makes the point
that Clara is such a girl (“pretty and thoughtless”) that she needs help to look after the
house (paragraph 2). Once she has secured the symbolic keys, she takes her new position as
mistress of the house for granted once and for all (paragraph 3). Although she pretends to
help Clara, she actually robs her of her rights.
When Clara dares to question this situation, Jane makes a show of being willing to
move out (l. 74-5). This implies two things. She does not want to exert a power that is
rightfully Clara’s without her consent. Neither does she want to be a cause for dissent
between Edward and his wife. Both implicit claims are of course hypocritical. By making
this declaration, Jane moves Clara to beg her to stay (“I don’t want anybody to go” l. 82)
and makes her even more distressed. Besides, her intervention only heightens Edward’s
anger (l. 76) and intensifies the conflictual tone of the discussion. She even pretends to cry
(l. 100-2) to establish her role as a victim of Clara’s ill-will.
Although Clara tries to defend herself, she accepts the situation as presented by the
Murdstones. Indeed, the very fact that she does so testifies to their victory. She acts as a
defendant, for instance calling for the “evidence” of a witness (Peggotty, l. 20-22 and 130) to
show her innocence, admitting that she stands accused and thus playing the role that they
have assigned her.
In other words, Jane Murdstone’s hypocritical behaviour is part of a larger strategy
to crush Clara’s personality in order to establish power in the household. Clara is
confirmed as a non-entity in the house she has inherited from her first husband. The other
strategist is of course her brother Edward, whose own hypocrisy is in great part invested in
his moralistic stance on “firmness”.
The narrator points out that Mr Murdstone believes in firmness (l. 38-9), adding that
in his opinion it is actually tyranny in disguise (l. 42-4). This in turn implies that not only is
Mr Murdstone tyrannical, but he is also a hypocrite. This is confirmed in the passage from
line 47 to line 59 which portrays him as a perfect pharisee: Mr Murdstone, in his own
opinion, is endowed to the utmost degree of the most precious quality in the world, namely
firmness. Not only does this give him moral superiority over the rest of mankind, but in
addition it affords him power over them. If he manages to establish authority over others,
he will then also be able to take the moral high ground by naming his power “firmness”
and transforming it into a moral quality. Mr Murdstone can be said to embody a large part
David Copperfield: extract 1 – commentary
of the Victorian ethos, whose moralistic hypocrisy Dickens relentlessly criticized, especially
in his earlier fiction.
Mr Murdstone’s firmness can be observed in this passage and opposed to the pliable
nature of David’s mother. On the one hand, a word from her husband is enough for Clara
to change her speech. For instance, after she mentions “her own house” (l. 60), she quickly
corrects herself to call it “our own house” (l. 64) then, without another prompt, “[his] own
house” (l. 67). On the other hand, when Clara tries to move Edward, he merely repeats the
same words (see l. 110 to 124). Reflecting the “stone” Murdstone, he never budges. As he
puts it (l. 132-5), “there is no extent of mere weakness that can have the least weight with
me”. Such is the world according to Murdstone: others must adapt to him, not he to them.
He sets the rules by which they have to abide.
Rather frighteningly, Mr Murdstone’s words do not sound like a lover’s but rather
like an enemy’s as they imply that this is no mere discussion or argument but a
confrontation, a fight for power. He even concludes “You lose breath,” which implies that
he despises her words. There is definitely neither love between them nor communication
since he is telling her that he refuses to listen to her. In addition, his words sound like a
grim omen, “you lose breath” suggesting impending death. As Betsey Trotwood, David’s
great-aunt, says to Murdstone in chapter XIV, Clara will die from not being loved by her
second husband.
Eventually, the Murdstones reign together over a house where “good” is the name of
evil and vice versa. They establish themselves as the rightful masters of Clara’s house and
her as a sort of guest, they make her feel as a wrongdoer instead of a victim, and so on. The
evil aura that surrounds them takes almost Sade-like proportions as they form something
like an incestuous couple, Jane replacing Clara, who is never called Murdstone in the
novel, the name being reserved for Edward and Jane.
Clara is of course their first victim, but we must not forget David. Mr Murdstone’s
final remark reminds us that he has witnessed the whole scene. However, he is more than
just a witness but also a victim in it. As his great-aunt points out to Edward in chapter XIV,
Clara inherited the house from her first husband, David’s father. Since Mr Murdstone
demanded from her absolute trust in him, she was prevented from providing for David to
inherit the house after her death. So David does not just witness the Murdstones morally
destroying his mother but also stealing his rightful heirloom from him. David the
character does not know it yet, but David the narrator knows that this scene makes for his
destitution after his mother’s death.
Furthermore, there is a discrepancy, even tension, between David as character and
narrator. Whereas David the narrator is absent from the scene, the narrator is omnipresent
through his comments and his staging of the scene. Maybe David tries to make up through
narration his shortcomings as a character. He lived this scene as a mute and impotent
witness. By narrating it, and by narrating it in the way he does, he stands up for his mother
and rights her wrongs, which he didn’t do as a character.